Crank: High Voltage. I know some of you saw it over the weekend, because I got strange texts and emails about Godzilla fights, full-body tourettes and David Carradine playing the most racist stereotype I’ve seen since Gary Oldman in True Romance. To those of you who haven’t seen the first film, let me explain something. Crank’s writers/directors were originally cinematographers — camera guys who were bored making normal movies and were tired of studios relying on CG to make the visuals exciting. These guys came up with all kinds of crazy new extreme! camera techniques…and then wrote a movie so they could test/implement them. So yeah…cinematographers writing a script. The plot of the film is dictated by what the ADD camera guys, who were tired of not being challenged on normal sets, are hoping to pull off. Are you expecting an Oscar nominated screenplay?

So that’s why I loved the first Crank film — visually, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Sure it had Jason Statham and sex and violence and video game graphics and humor and an over-the-top insane plot, but it was all done to fit into a style of shooting that rarely ever calms down.

Now given that little background on the guys responsible for the first film, do you think they’d be satisfied not taking things to the next level, visually, with the sequel? Of course not. One example: There is a fight scene filmed as a King Kong vs Godzilla movie. As in, all of a sudden these two dudes are 100-stories tall in strange rubber suits of themselves punching each other and throwing electrical towers. No CG here, in fact you can see the fucking cables they’re attached to when they fly into each other. And then as quickly as it happened, it cuts back to real life mode. That’s pretty much the whole film — a sequence of jarring cuts and over-the-top action, which is exactly what everyone should be expecting.

As far as the movie as a whole, I could have done with 10 or 15 minutes less. It was nice of them to bring back It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Dennis in his role from the first film, but that was kind of drawn out a bit. So was the public sex scene. Yes, they outdid the first one, but it lasted too long — especially since anyone who’d seen the preview knew it was coming. And I could have done without the talk show segment, too. I don’t really think that worked.

Based on a single viewing, I’ll give it a B+. I’d like to see it again because the goddamn thing moved so fast. I’m sure I missed some dialogue or background visuals. I’d also like to confirm that Bai Ling and her subtitled dialogue may have been the best part of the film. I’ll have to wait until it leaks, though. Ten bucks to see a fuzzy picture in a filthy theater is a huge rip-off. When a movie can look and sound better on someone’s home theater than at the Star, why are people still paying to be uncomfortable?

Review: ‘Crank’ sequel goes gloriously over the top
Interview: Crank 2 Directors Neveldine/Taylor: ‘Pretty Soon, We’ll Shoot a Movie On Our Blackberries’
Crank 3: In 3D